Why not use a free email sorting tool like this?
http://www.emailtray.com/email-sorting-software.html
It takes care of unnecessary email junk
How To Win At Email
41–50 of 51 posts
Re: How To Win At Email
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, thank you. You still see them in your inbox view (due to multiple inbox) so you are still aware of them.
My point (and I was being a bit snide, sorry) was not that you haven't been clear enough - anyone who needs a picture to understand the end result hasn't been paying attention while reading - but that I don't count it as "inbox zero". It feels like cheating, like saying "here's how to completely clean all of the rubbish out of your living room: dump it in the kitchen".
Yeah I definitely don't have a perfect solution for this. Sometimes it piles up. One thing that I have found effective is having a designated end of day "clean up to-do list" time. Definitely open to hearing what you think would be a good solution.
Re: How To Win At Email
#43The best thing I ever did in Gmail was filter the word "unsubscribe" to skip the inbox and go into a "Newsletters" label. Whenever I peek in there I see nothing but garbage, dozens of emails a day that I wouldn't have cared about. Right now it's sitting at 5,162 unread emails. It keeps my inbox almost always being things that are relevant or interesting. I've shared this with a few friends who love it. It's pretty fl…
Brilliant solution, nearly a 100% reliable though, what are the chances of an important email containing "unsubscribe" ??
another option could be using https://unroll.me/
Re: How To Win At Email
#44I follow a lot of software mailing lists. I used to use Gmail with labels for them, but it still took a lot of time sifting through to the important stuff, and subscribing/unsubscribing felt like a pain. Also, I would end up never actually opening the stuff that skipped my inbox, filling up my account with never-read emails from lists that I might as well unsubscribe from.
Then I switched to Gnus in Emacs, and for mailing lists at least it is a world of difference. Scoring in Gnus ensures important emails are at the top, unimportant are at the bottom, I can press "c" to mark all as read, almost all frequently used functions require a single keypress, and subscribing to a new mailing list also typically only requires a couple keypresses, and unsubscribing is "ctrl+k".
Real world example: I want to follow any subjects in the high-volume libreoffice-dev list that contain the word "proofreading". I do "^" and search for "libreoffice", click enter to subscribe, enter to open the group and click "I" to add an increase-score-rule ('subject contains string "proofreading"). Next time I open the group, all high-scoring threads will be at the top and I can press "n" to go through them quickly, then "c" to mark the rest as read. You can do this sort of thing with filters and IMAP flags ("stars") of course, but they take so much more time to set up and change and yet only give one level of priority (what if you want certain authors to be more prioritised than others, when talking about proofreading?). If I ever tire of following those subjects, I just ctrl+k on the group to remove it forever, I never have to open an "unsubscribe" page – it's a single keypress, and it's offline. Switching from gmail to gnus for mailing lists was for me like switching from svn to git. Of course, you do need to be an Emacs user already, otherwise you'll probably just be frustrated …
Re: How To Win At Email
#45I like a lot about the information presented in this article. I've got the accounts stuff figured out, and reasonably good filters setup. But the rest it handled by mailboxapp.com on my iPhone. Gestures getting through my email is such a win (Later? , Trash? --->). I'm not nearly disciplined enough to go through a "todo" filter. With Mailbox, I can say when I should look at it again, and then I'm reminded about it.
Another thing I've done is the username+service@gmail.com trick. Easiest account filtering possible.
Re: How To Win At Email
#46The #1 thing that has helped me to keep emails organized is taking advantage of the + notation that gmail allows... Every store or website I give my email address to, I simply append (emailaddress+storename@gmail.com) to my email address, which allows for easy filtering later. It also shows me who has been giving out my email address :)
On a similar note, gmail allows you so put dots in your email address, so when I give my email address out to humans, I use first.last@gmail.com, and when I give it to computers, I use firstlast@gmail.com
I find that this easily filters out machine generated addresses, always works on forms, and if spambots ever get wise to it, it'd be difficult for them to add in the dot at the correct place, whereas taking out the stuff after the plus would be quite easy
Re: How To Win At Email
#47This is very similar to the system in the book, "Getting Things Done", which is what I use for Outlook. The salient point is to use your inbox only as a temp bin for processing email. I create folders for all my projects and file emails there. I also have 3 folders: "Action", "Waiting", and "Bills". Action items are To-do items. Waiting is where I am waiting for a response, such as a delivery confirmation email. Bills are email bills to be paid. After acting on the email, it gets moved to the relevant project folder for archiving.
Re: How To Win At Email
#48Seems relevant: I ended up writing my own little app to help me quickly process my GMail emails on iPhone. Back when I wrote it there was no "Mailbox" which is a similar concept. It really has helped a lot for staying on top of my email: http://app.net/emptyinbox
Re: How To Win At Email
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was/am a big fan and a power user. I think it's worth pointing out around two weeks ago Streak automatically put a signature file into any Streak based email without asking you to opt in. I thought suddenly dropping "Lovingly managed by Streak" as a new signature file without permission showed poor judgement or desperation.
Co-founder of Streak here. Chalk that one up to poor judgement. We definitely screwed up with that one and are really friggin sorry about that. We gave settings to disable that when it launched, but that was obviously not sufficient especially since it was on by default. After it started to roll out and we got complaints pretty much instantly, we turned it off within a few hours. So ya, if this soured you permanent o…
Thank you so much for building Streak!! Not sure what I'd do without it.
Re: How To Win At Email
#50The #1 thing that has helped me to keep emails organized is taking advantage of the + notation that gmail allows... Every store or website I give my email address to, I simply append (emailaddress+storename@gmail.com) to my email address, which allows for easy filtering later. It also shows me who has been giving out my email address :)
A significant amount of websites filter on the + and will throw an error as an invalid character in the email string. Very annoying.
Very, very annoying... This is what a friend of mine always sends to those who choose to filter valid characters from email addresses... https://gist.github.com/EHLOVader/4531693